CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE RETURN OF TOPSY

“Dixie Martin, come quick if you want to see something. Oh-ee! It’s something you’ve been wanting for weeks and weeks.”

It was Carol who called. The small curly-headed girl was hanging out clothes in the sunny yard, back of the log cabin, while the older sister stood on a box beside a washtub in the shade of a spreading pine tree.

Hearing the excited voice of her little sister calling to her, Dixie hastily wrung out the pair of patched blue rompers that she was washing, and, with soapy suds glistening on her hands, she ran around the house, wondering what she was to see.

To her great joy, coming across the garden toward them was no less a creature than her long-strayed and much-loved cat, Topsy.

With a cry of delight, Dixie wiped the suds from her hands on her blue all-over apron, and rushing at the rather thin and rusty-looking cat, she caught it up in her arms and kissed it on the nose, eyes, and even on the paws.

“Oh, you dearest, darlingest, belovedest!” she exclaimed. “Wherever have you been? You look like a reg’lar tramp cat, and no wonder,—your coat hasn’t been sleeked for three weeks if it’s a day. Didn’t you love your Dixie any more, that you ran away and wouldn’t come back? You don’t know how lonesome I’ve been.”

The little girl’s face was burrowed in the soft black hair. The pussy-cat purred its contentment when its little mistress sat on a stump near by to cuddle it in her lap, but suddenly Topsy flipped up an ear and sat erect, as though she had just thought of something. Then, before the astonished girls could guess what it was all about, away the cat darted toward an old abandoned shed down near the apple-orchard, soon reappearing with a very small something in its mouth.

The older girl had turned back to the washtub, but another exclamation as excited as the first brought her whirling about.

“Dix Martin, Topsy’s done gone and had kittens. Oh-ee, do look! Isn’t it a little beauty? It’s black, like its mamma, but its spots are white.”

Topsy, holding her tail proudly erect, placed the wee pussy at Dixie’s feet, then looked up in a manner that seemed to say, “There now, what do you think of that for a baby?”

Dixie lifted the soft cuddly little thing, and was about to tell the happy mother that it was indeed a darling, when, with a queer little short meow, the cat again turned and trotted off toward the shed, to soon reappear with another wee pussy, but this one was as white as the driven snow.

“Oh-h!” the two girls breathed a long sigh of admiration, for never had there been a lovelier pussy, they were sure. Just then Ken, with an ax over his shoulder, appeared from the mountain-trail, whither he had been to cut wood for their winter fires.

“What you-all got there?” he called. And when he saw that they were beckoning excitedly, he threw his axe to the ground and ran toward them.

“Gee whiz! Aren’t they beauts?” the boy exclaimed with genuine admiration. “They’re ’most as handsome as my little pig,” he added teasingly.

“Why, Ken Martin, little pigs aren’t warm and soft and cuddly, nor baby goats, either,” Carol began, when Dixie interrupted, the light of inspiration in her thin, freckled face.

“Oh, Caroly, you’ve always wished you had a white pussy, and so you may have this one all for your very own, and Ken can have the other.”

“Me?” the boy exclaimed wide-eyed. “I don’t want a cat. They’re pets for girls.”

“Well, maybe that’s so. Girls like cuddly things.” Then, to the mother puss, Dixie said: “Well, Topsy-cat, we’re ever so glad that you have such nice babies, and won’t Jimmy-Boy be pleased when he wakes up, but now I must get back to my work, for this is wash-day. I want to get through as soon as ever I can, for something—oh, so interesting!—is going to happen this very afternoon. I am to go up to teacher’s to have a lesson.”

Dixie did not say what the lesson was to be, but she glanced at her sister and thought, “If Carol only knew that I am to have a lesson in making her a blue-silk dress, wouldn’t she be the happiest girl that ever was?”

The younger girl had no desire to accompany Dixie to Miss Bayley’s cabin. The very word “lesson” did not appeal to her on a glorious Saturday. After taking the kittens back to the shed and making them a softer bed, the girls finished the washing; then at two o’clock they donned their best gingham dresses and started out together, but soon parted, as Carol was going to the Valley Ranch to visit Sue Piggins, to hear what had happened during the week at the girls’ boarding-school over in Reno, which Sue attended.